The Dress in the Window Read online

  Dedication

  For my dad

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One: Taffeta

  Two: Tweed

  Three: Tulle

  Four: Broadcloth

  Five: Ninon

  Six: Brocatelle

  Seven: Crêpe

  Eight: Greige

  Epilogue

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the Author

  About the Book

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Winter of 1945

  Brunskill, Pennsylvania

  There is nothing lovely about Minisink Avenue. If it ever could have been said to enjoy a period of prosperity, when steam engines came along toward the end of the last century to boost the production of the tweeds and plaids, the blankets and shawls, the zephyrs and most of all the rough, heavy cottonade—called “Negro cloth” everywhere but in the Center City salesroom—that period came at the expense of the stooped and mute workers, some of them as young as seven, working thirteen hours a day and never earning enough to rise out of the cheap cramped housing in the floodplain of the Schuylkill.

  In the twenties, the English and Scottish and Germans gave way to the Italians and eastern Europeans moving their families into the cramped row houses. Across the river, Philadelphia may have been dubbed the “Workshop of the World,” but in the mills, the spinners and carders and mules toiled as miserably as ever—making carpets, upholstery fabric, and woolen plush—and still only the bosses seemed to thrive, moving their families up the river to Roxborough. The mill complexes expanded, reinforced concrete and brick grafted onto the old stone, ingesting the workers hungrily before dawn and belching out smoke as though they had swallowed whole the modest dreams and hopes, the bodies bent by the work and crippled by swollen joints and spinner’s phthisis.

  The Depression delivered its merciless judgment and sent the last of the cotton south. Their eyes finally open, perhaps, the bosses strived and pleaded, but the workers—long accustomed to calamity and so inured to tragedy as to be nearly indifferent to their fate—took a gamble and demanded six more dollars a week. The last of the textile mills were shuttered, and the only smoke in the sky was from pulp and paper production. All those buildings, empty save for squatters and thieves, their forges and furnaces cold. When they occasionally caught fire and burned, the few souls who remained in the tenements on the hill watched from their filthy windows and cursed in half a dozen languages.

  There is no reason for you to find yourself here. The odors wafting from the river are foul; the grit in the air, drifting from the rail tracks, will find its way into your eyes and nostrils and lips, until you taste ash that makes you think of the terrible stories coming back from Europe—the burnt skeletons they found in the pits, all those babies killed before they could ever find their mothers’ breasts.

  Or maybe it is this news that compelled you to walk here, leaving behind the golden-glow windows in the nicer streets away from the river and the mills, where widows and grief-dumb mothers and luckier women alike are washing dishes after the meals that still take us all aback, so accustomed are we to the penury of the ration books. Who knows what to do with a chop fried in butter, after all these months of watery stews bobbing with offal? It’s as though our bodies recoil from plenty.

  Of course you’ve lost someone, everyone has; but maybe you’ve lost more than most, or maybe you lost the one to whom you could tell your secrets, so now they echo in your hollow breast with nowhere to go. These secrets might propel you down these steep streets where the ghosts of the wretched seem to linger.

  In front of the old woolen mill, you pause to light a cigarette and stamp your feet against the chill, your boots making prints in the thin snow that settled on the town like a feather tick since the weak sun surrendered. Inhaling with no great pleasure, you notice a faint glow from within the largest of the buildings, the original stone one that housed the mill’s offices, where visitors were received; but it is not so different from all the others now: windows boarded and broken, anything of value carted off long ago. The cornerstone is carved with the numerals 1881; over the door the legend MURPHREE & SON stands stately and proud. There is no way for you to know that the younger Murphree perished from influenza before the doors of the mill ever opened for business. The last man to own the building was named Brink, and he had no sons at all.

  Brink was a modest man, and a silent one, so the workers who loomed the fine wovens in his factory had no access to his inner thoughts and dreams, except on the few occasions—half a dozen, at most—in which he drank at lunch and came back maudlin and raging.

  Brink died in 1939, without ceremony. The mill closed, the new war came, boys enlisted and were drafted, and soon there were no young men to plunder what was left for sport. The buildings and everything in them were as dead and decaying as the mill’s last owner.

  But that light you see emanating from inside—if you are curious, if you put your gloved hand to the knob you will find it unlocked; if you stay to the edges of the floor where the boards do not squeak, if you avoid stumbling over the stacks of pallets and broken chairs lining the hall leading to the open workroom, you will find yourself privy to a scene of such shocking depravity that it will take your breath. Surely, you have seen men and women naked; the mysteries of intercourse have long been revealed to you. Perhaps you have experienced a love affair or two, or even a great passion of your own. But it is unlikely that you have ever seen anything like these two.

  The moldering bolts of soiled and ruined cloth have been pulled from the benches; yards and yards lie carelessly mounded to make a crude pallet. The light that caught your eye comes from sputtering, rough-made candles, the cheapest to be had at the mercantile, fixed to the workbench with no regard to the pooling wax or even the risk of the flame catching. And this building would burn—how quickly it would burn, its timbers and rafters exposed! But the lovers don’t care; the lovers, anyone can see, care nothing for the future, the past, for anything but this moment, this single crack in the wretched crushing yoke of their lives. Look at how he seizes her hair in his fists; look at how he bucks like an animal. See her twist and groan below him; she pounds his chest with her fists until he catches her wrists in his strong, scarred hands. She shows her teeth; he calls her by another woman’s name, by her own, by no name at all. There are long scratches that each will have to hide tomorrow. A sheet metal screw has dug into her hip as she fought and writhed, but later she will have no idea how the blood came to stain her skirts, how her skin was punctured and bruised. The sting of the iodine with which she will dress the wound tomorrow will not seem like nearly penance enough.

  As for him, he’ll find her blond hairs on his horsehair coat and curse himself. For his weakness; for his lack of courage, now and before. He has no doubt his debt will be settled at death’s reckoning. Hell waits for him, but he figures he may as well get a head start on learning to live with eternal damnation. And so tonight he takes what he can, drinks deep of her intoxicating poison.

  They carry on into the night, and even if you make a sound—even if you take a trumpet from your coat and blast its strident notes—they’ll have no use for you, with your patched cloth coat and your darned socks and your thin pressed handkerchiefs. You are nothing to them. They are, for these few stolen hours, the only creatures left on this damned earth.

  One

  Taffeta

  Taffeta is a cruel fabric, as fickle and delicate as it is alluring. Handle it carelessly, and you’ll wreck a garment in any of a dozen different ways. Set down a glass of water wh
ile you’re cutting out a panel for a gored skirt and you’ll never get the ring out; use a dull needle and the hole will pop and run. A lazily finished seam will unravel at breathless speed. Even a bitten fingernail can leave a snag you can’t smooth away.

  November 1948

  Jeanne

  Nancy Cosgrove had seen the gown made up in taffeta in Vogue, and taffeta was what she had to have. Jeanne made a muslin first, at Nancy’s insistence, even though muslin could never stand in for the stiff, slippery hand of the real thing. The muslin’s skirt hung around Nancy’s lumpy hips like wet rags and Jeanne thought she’d finally come to her senses—but Nancy just went home to get her crinoline. It made only a slight improvement: the muslin spread out over the stiff underskirt like leaves floating on a pond. But Nancy took herself across the river to the city, where she found a bolt of emerald green moiré taffeta in a shop at the corner of Fourth and Fulton.

  When she brought it back, the bolt of fabric sitting in the passenger seat of her garish two-tone Packard Clipper like a visiting dignitary, it occurred to Jeanne that Nancy might still be trying to one-up her, even after everything that had happened. Never mind that Jeanne slept in the unfinished attic of the narrow row house that she shared with her sister and her niece and Thelma Holliman. She suspected that there was a part of Nancy that was stuck back at Mother of Mercy High School, where Jeanne had sailed like a swan through adolescence, winning top marks and courted by a steady stream of St. Xavier boys. By contrast, poor Nancy had been as awkward as a stump, beloved by no teacher, no suitors, and none of the other girls.

  Jeanne tried not to hold this belated vengefulness against Nancy: they badly needed her money. Still, Nancy had no head for sums, and there was not enough fabric on the bolt for the New Look dress she had hired Jeanne to sew for her. Unlike the wide bolt of unbleached muslin that Jeanne kept on a length of baling wire on Thelma’s back porch, the taffeta that Nancy brought back was only forty-eight inches wide—a scant forty-eight inches at that, the selvages taking up the better part of an inch on either side. Jeanne could barely cut a skirt panel from it—even with Nancy’s oddly short, bowed calves—and only by forgoing the deep hem she’d planned in favor of an understitched facing.

  Jeanne had been up the night before until nearly three in the morning, hand-tacking that facing with a single strand of superfine Zimmerman and a straw needle. When she finally went to bed, she had an unsettling dream. It had been months since she’d dreamed of Charles, but suddenly there he was, wearing a hat that had hung on a nail in the carriage house of his parents’ estate in Connecticut, a western style of hat that his father had brought back from a trip to Montana.

  But in the dream Charles frowned at her from beneath its broad brim, while he pressed his hands to his stomach, trying to stanch the blood pouring from the hole in his side, while all around him in the trenches of Cisterna, his fellow Rangers were felled by the German panzers. Only six of them came home, out of more than seven hundred—but Jeanne didn’t care about any of them. She would have traded them all to have Charles back.

  War had made a monster of her, and there was nothing she could do about it—except to sew. A stitch, another, another. In this way the minutes and hours passed.

  IT WAS THE second week of Advent and their little parlor was decked out in paper snowflakes and a wreath of fresh greens, but that was all for Tommie. The rest of the household was sick of pretending to be cheerful. Thelma had come down with shingles in the fall and spent long afternoons in her room, and Tommie had a cough that persisted through one week and then another, terrible racking coughs that seemed much too harsh to come out of a six-year-old.

  “Stop pacing,” Jeanne snapped, as Peggy swished by again to peer out the window, with Tommie clinging to her like a barnacle. Tommie was a stocky child, and too old to be carried like an infant. Jeanne didn’t know how her sister managed—a few turns around the park could put Jeanne’s back out for a week. But today it seemed to be the only way to get Tommie to stop fussing.

  “You’re the one who told me to keep watch,” Peggy retorted.

  “Girls! Stop bickering!” came Thelma’s muffled call from the kitchen, where she was making stock, simmering last night’s chicken carcass in hopes of getting another meal out of it. It galled Jeanne that Thelma still called them “girls” when she was twenty-eight and Peggy was twenty-seven, but she was not in a position to complain. She was the interloper here, the recipient of charity, a fact that she loathed but could not change.

  Before Jeanne could respond, there was a knock at the door. She peeked out the parlor window, and there was Nancy’s car, parked out front. Jeanne fixed a smile on her face and opened the door. Nancy wore a houndstooth coat too dowdy for a woman twice her age, and it was all Jeanne could do not to tilt her head in subtle disdain the way she’d once done, in the halls of Mother of Mercy a decade earlier. She had forgotten, during the long hours of sewing since fitting Nancy with the muslin, the way she leaned slightly forward on the balls of her feet, like an old dog ready to collapse; had forgotten Nancy’s stomping gait as she came into their front room. The gown Jeanne had just finished was a thing of delicate beauty, and it was hard to bear the thought of Nancy’s lumpish figure stuffed into it.

  Still, it would flatter her as much as any gown could, and Jeanne was counting on the other guests at the ball to notice, to lavish Nancy with compliments. Jeanne knew Nancy wouldn’t be able to resist telling people who had sewn the gown for her: girls like Nancy never forgot the cruel hierarchy of high school, and having Jeanne in her employ would be a card she would play for all it was worth.

  Nancy was far from the only woman in Brunskill who was wealthier than most but still unable to afford to shop in Paris or New York, or even the finer shops in Philadelphia. Jeanne was her best-kept secret, but hoped not to be a secret for long. If she could get a commission like this one every week, it would pay for groceries for the household, even a chicken every Sunday night. And that would do until Jeanne figured out the next chapter in her life.

  “Well?” Nancy said, barely nodding at Peggy, who stood swaying with Tommie in her arms. “Where is it?”

  Jeanne went to Thelma’s bedroom, where she’d hung the gown from the door of the closet, and said a quick prayer before lifting the dress from the hook and carrying it out in front of her. Thelma emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, a faintly imperious expression on her face. Thelma, Jeanne knew, did not care for Nancy either. She considered Nancy common, a peculiar vanity for a widow of a drayage driver. But like the rest of them, Thelma had once been someone else too.

  Nancy’s sharp intake of breath belied her studied indifference. She touched the bodice reverently with nails filed into sharp points and painted crimson. “It’s lovely,” she said, “but don’t you think . . . I mean, I wanted the waist nipped close. Like the picture, you know?”

  Jeanne knew exactly what Nancy wanted. Every woman in America had seen those photographs in the paper, the fashion firestorm sweeping the nation ever since Christian Dior’s scandalous collection launched last year in Paris. An outrageous reaction to the leanness and rationing of wartime, Dior’s New Look was nothing if not controversial. It featured wasp waists, padded hips, and close-fitting sleeves—and flowing, voluminous skirts, falling to the ankle even in day length, all of it hinging on an hourglass of a figure that few women came by naturally.

  All that fabric, all that weight—excessive, screamed the American press. MR. DIOR, WE ABHOR DRESSES TO THE FLOOR, read a placard carried by a housewife protesting in Chicago, in a photo that was picked up by all the major newspapers. Husbands in several cities called for a boycott.

  But the tides of fashion would not be turned back. Women had emerged from the war in the worn, threadbare, much-mended clothes in which they entered it, their few wartime outfits lean and spare according to the penurious regulations of fabric rationing. No cuffs, no pleats or gathers, no trim or pockets. No dolman sleeves, no skirts past thirty i
nches. They welcomed the feminine silhouette and hungered for the ballerina skirts and soft shoulders, no matter how impractical or expensive to produce.

  Jeanne had fitted the silk bodice as tight as she could without asphyxiating Nancy, whose waist had disappeared after the birth of her second child. She would see this for herself once she put on the dress.

  But tact—even a bit of prevarication—was called for now. “Oh, don’t you worry,” Jeanne said, folding the dress over her arm at the waist. “A good corset will take care of that. I’ll tell you what—why don’t you put it on and I’ll pin the adjustments.”

  Nancy shrugged in what she probably imagined was a queenly fashion. Peggy appeared at her elbow, Tommie suddenly nowhere to be seen. She had applied a slash of vivid scarlet lipstick, and that one simple addition made her appear radiant again. If Jeanne had once been the famous beauty of the family, Peggy had surprised everyone by blossoming late. It was as though tragedy had smoothed the sharp edges of her impetuous youth and given her a sense of languid melancholy, like Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia.

  “Come into the changing room,” Peggy said in the bored, throaty voice she sometimes assumed for company. Nancy glanced at Jeanne suspiciously before following Peggy into the larder, and Jeanne opened her mouth to speak—but was startled to silence by a rare, conspiratorial wink from Thelma. Only yesterday Jeanne had been on her hands and knees in the tiny, dank room, scrubbing a bit of onion skin that had adhered itself to the old wooden floor by a smudge of damp black mold, but now a flash of bright light emerged from the doorway.

  “She wanted to surprise you,” Thelma murmured, pinching Jeanne’s forearm lightly. Jeanne could smell her rosewater perfume mixed with the yeasty scents of baking. Thelma pinched her a second time. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? You’ve got that head of yours in the clouds, birthday girl!”